Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Early life Leonard was born in 1961 in Liberty, New York. Leonard's mother was a Polish refugee who was born in Warsaw, immigrating to America at the age of 9 during World War II. Her mother's family were wealthy members of the Polish aristocracy who were involved in the movement for Polish independence and the Polish Resistance. Many members of Leonard's maternal line were killed during the war. Despite being non-Jews, her mother's family was persecuted by the Nazis for their opposition to Nazism and their Polish nationalism. Leonard has stated that her grandmother "was really invested in this idea that we were still aristocracy", although her family was living in poverty in Harlem. Aged 16, she dropped out of school and started taking photographs. She has spent most of her adult life living in New York City, whose built environment has been the subject matter of much of her work (e.g. sidewalks, storefronts, apartment buildings, chain-link fencing, graffiti, and boarded-up windows.) Leonard became well known internationally following her installation at Documenta IX in 1992. Career From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard's work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explained in an interview: "Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world — in short, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world." Leonard was active in AIDS advocacy and queer politics in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 she wrote "I want a president", a poem inspired by Eileen Myles's run for president. In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work Strange Fruit, an installation of various fruit skins (oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons) that Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread. Strange Fruit is dedicated to the friend